Household Smart Water Metering in Spain: Insights from the Experience of Remote Meter Reading in Alicante

Hug March,Álvaro-Francisco Morote,David Saurí,Antonio-Manuel Rico

doi:10.3390/su9040582

Abstract

Since the past few years, the smart city paradigm has been influencing sustainable urban water resources management. Smart metering schemes for end users have become an important strategy for water utilities to have an in-depth and fine-grained knowledge about urban water use. Beyond reducing certain labor costs, such as those related to manual meter reading, such detailed and continuous flow of information is said to enhance network efficiency and improve water planning by having more detailed demand patterns and forecasts. Research focusing on those initiatives has been very prolific in countries such as Australia. However, less academic attention has been paid to the development of smart metering in other geographies. This paper focuses on smart water metering in Spain and, more particularly, documents and reflects on the experience of the city of Alicante (southeastern Spain), a pioneer case of massive deployment of remote reading of water meters at the household level and for large urban customers. Through data and interviews with water managers from the water utility, we shed light on the costs and early benefits, as well as the potentialities and (unexpected) problems of this technology to contribute to more sustainable urban water cycles.

Highlights

The past few years have witnessed an emergence of the smart city paradigm both in the Global North and Global South contexts [1,2,3,4,5]
We focused on the following aspects: issues experienced during the implementation process of smart meters for different end-users; advantages of the smart meters compared to conventional meters for the company and how this is translated into economic benefits in comparison with conventional meters (CAPEX and operating expenses for Aguas de Alicante (OPEX)); and the advantages and issues reported by final users to the company
Smart metering schemes emerge as a central feature behind the quest for more efficient and sustainable urban water supply networks in the 21st century

Summary

Introduction

The past few years have witnessed an emergence of the smart city paradigm both in the Global North and Global South contexts [1,2,3,4,5]. Large water corporations are putting efforts into research, development and implementation of smart technologies with a particular eye on reducing costs and on having a deeper knowledge of water demand to streamline services and make possible more accurate demand forecasting. In part, this may be related to the decline in revenue experienced by many companies as domestic consumptions are falling in the urban areas of the developed world. Four key processes are inherent to smart metering schemes: measurement, data transfer, processing and analysis and feedback of water use data

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Conclusion